By: Anna Lenaker, Pacific Institute Research Associate
Photo credit: Dylan Silver/Trout Unlimited
What if beavers had it right all along? What if one of California’s best tools for developing water resilience is a pile of sticks? At Horseshoe Meadow, the answer was clear by lunchtime.
This summer Trout Unlimited invited the California Water Resilience Initiative (CWRI) team and other stakeholders to visit Horseshoe Meadow in the Eastern Sierra. There, they showed us their restoration work in the high mountain meadows of the Golden Trout Wilderness. By reconnecting the meadow to its historic floodplain, their [AL1] work enhances natural mountain water storage.
That matters because California faces an estimated 10% reduction in available water by 2040, including reduced mountain snowpack that stores water seasonally before melting to supply communities at lower elevations. Sometimes referred to as “green glaciers”, mountain meadows are natural reservoirs: they hold water that eventually trickles down and is used by valley communities below. High mountain meadows throughout the Sierra Nevada mountains are an important water source for Californians. In this case, water stored in the Horseshoe Meadow “reservoir” ultimately gets used by communities in Los Angeles.
Currently, these meadows are not working as they should. Mountain meadows in the Sierra Nevada have been significantly degraded by cattle grazing from the mid-nineteenth century onward, which reduced the soil’s ability to absorb and retain water and eroded the streambanks, deepening the stream channels. In practice, water now moves quickly through this landscape and exits it, instead of the meadow serving as a natural reservoir.
Recognizing the challenges California’s drier future poses to communities and economies state-wide, CWRI aims to reduce, reuse, and restore one million acre-feet of water annually by 2030. Specifically, CWRI promotes projects delivering water benefits to corporate funders whose contributions help make these projects possible.
The Trout Unlimited team implements low-tech process-based restoration of these high-mountain meadows, meaning they use simple tools, lots of manual labor, and zero heavy machinery –– not even wheelbarrows –– to get the job done. Why? The land is designated as a federal Wilderness Area with strong protections against human impacts.
So, workers use saws to bring down lodgepole pines that have encroached into the meadow’s floodplain or that are in dense areas in need of thinning. These pines are then used to construct Beaver Dam Analogs (BDAs) and Post-Assisted Log Structures (PALS). Both structures mimic what a beaver would do, piling woody debris in the stream to slow and spread water, creating newly ponded areas that begin to reconnect the meadow to its historic floodplain.
Beyond surface water storage, the benefits of this restoration work include improved water quality, increased groundwater infiltration, and habitat for the native California golden trout.
This restoration work was amazing to witness because its impact is immediate. Structures had slowed the water and raised the stream by early afternoon. Eddie Corwin, CWRI’s Technical Lead, likens this work to ‘restoration jiu jitsu’: you are taking the energy of natural systems and shifting it to work for you. In this approach, nature does the work. All that is needed is the small human intervention of piling some woody debris and driving in a few wooden posts.
And it is work most people can do.
Trout Unlimited’s mountain meadow restoration work in the Golden Trout Wilderness has been supported by roughly $1 million in corporate contributions to date. By slowing and spreading water, these projects are keeping an extra 5,000 acre-feet of water, about 1.6 billion gallons, in high mountain meadows in the Kern and Owens River watersheds each year, supporting critical habitat for Golden Trout and downstream water supply resilience for California’s communities. Notably, low-tech process-based restoration is much cheaper than alternatives.
I left Horseshoe Meadow with renewed hope: simple actions, such as piling up woody debris just as the beaver would, can do a great deal for an ecosystem so long as you have folks committed to the work. The Trout Unlimited team is doing something simple at a watershed scale with positive statewide impacts. Nature can do a lot of the work of recovery, and many of us have the tools and knowledge to contribute to making that possible. Through CWRI, we will keep doing our part to promote and partner with a diversity of water resilience projects across the state, connecting corporate funders with irrigation modernization efforts that reduce agricultural water use, toilet leak detection technologies that reduce urban water waste, and landscape restoration efforts like this. Beavers worked this out a long time ago.
Click here to learn more about process-based restoration in California. Click here to learn more about CWRI. Finally, you can learn more about TU California’s headwater restoration work here.